1. Great to get involved with Naomi Kashiwagi’s #inthemix sessions at MadLabUK. I brought along a 4bit (possibly less) crunchy lasercut acrylic bootleg of That Fucking Tank’s ‘Brucesteenhenge’ and a micro rumble strip prototype all made with the elegant coding and calculation of Amanda Ghassaei’s Instructable. Try it! Must be the most elaborate and useless bootleg of their brilliant work it gets worse each time you play it…I will have to send them one in tribute to their work with Never Records in Liverpool… Then really good to think about other forms of making music physical or the other way round with people like James Medd who showed me his Physical Echoes project. As usual another brilliant mix of people at Madlab!

    Great to get involved with Naomi Kashiwagi’s #inthemix sessions at MadLabUK. I brought along a 4bit (possibly less) crunchy lasercut acrylic bootleg of That Fucking Tank’s ‘Brucesteenhenge’ and a micro rumble strip prototype all made with the elegant coding and calculation of Amanda Ghassaei’s Instructable. Try it! Must be the most elaborate and useless bootleg of their brilliant work it gets worse each time you play it…I will have to send them one in tribute to their work with Never Records in Liverpool…

    Then really good to think about other forms of making music physical or the other way round with people like James Medd who showed me his Physical Echoes project. As usual another brilliant mix of people at Madlab!

  2. Completed the first Currently hackspace! Successfully launched our prototype #SerialBuoy a design using recycled water bottles found by John O’Shea on instructables. We used Steve Symon’s handy EasyRadio module to send basic asci messages from the dockside to an LED flasher onboard and of course Open Source Swan Pedalo to launch it driven by Amanda Steggell, Steven Thorpe and Elisabeth Weihe.

  3. @amcewen and I played around with #NoisyTable and managed to use the comport object in PureData to turn the MIDI output of the NoisyTable arduino into a solenoid trigger using some simple toy bells that we made an acrylic stand @OFFCUTLiverpool.

    We didn’t manage a #pingpong rendition of jingle bells but we did play some chords! @mikestubbs brought his kids along for testing purposes later. Plan is to get some fresh solenoids attached to the ‘bellhack bellrack’ and the code for reading MIDI and serial all packaged up into a usb powered device so we can get it touring wherever #NoisyTable goes in the future.

  4. Astroturf

    AstroturfFlyer

    Saturday 24th November 2012 4pm - 7.30pm FREE

    Everton Park Off Heyworth Street

    Please use top car park Off Heyworth Street at entrance near May Duncans Pub or park on Heyworth Street. Pedestrians enter on Heyworth Street near the Breck Road traffic lights, follow the glowing signs and people with High Viz vests!

    Click Here for Directions

    Liverpool Astronomical Society 

    FREE Family Astronomy Event

    Astroturf is a family friendly event to introduce the objects of the night sky and the many ways you can observe, from optical and radio telescopes to social media, mobile applications and simply looking up and recognising satellites, stars and constellations. 

    Part of Liverpool Biennials “Unexpected Guest” programme, artist Ross Dalziel has invited the ‘unexpected knowledge’ of Merseyside’s community of amazing amateur astronomy enthusiasts of Liverpool Astronomical Society Sidewalk Astronomy (LASSA). This 129 year old organisation will help show families and artists the amazing activity in the night sky and allow people to explore the local DIY expertise of their city at a site overlooking the Liverpool skyline.

    Observing

    Fingers crossed we will get a clear & dry window to use the amazing telescopes of the North West amateur astronomers of (LASSA)

    Making

    Make Planispheres and night vision torches

    Talks & Presentations

    Introduction Ross Dalziel Artist

    The LAS Brendan Martin Liverpool Astronomical Society Observatory Director

    The X-Ray Universe Martyn Bristow Liverpool John Moores University Astrophysics Research Institute

    Pulsars and Machine Learning Rob Lyon Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics/MerseySTEM network

    Astroturf Links on Pinboard

  5. Last month worked with artist Dave Lynch to create Balloon Vortex an interactive play space using a series of fans to create a temporary vortex to drive LED embedded weather balloons around Whitehaven civic hall. A kinect tracked the objects and made projection mappings live while families were invited to customise balloons and play with the vortex system accompanied by sound workshops with Octopus. More pictures by Dave here.

    Last month worked with artist Dave Lynch to create Balloon Vortex an interactive play space using a series of fans to create a temporary vortex to drive LED embedded weather balloons around Whitehaven civic hall. A kinect tracked the objects and made projection mappings live while families were invited to customise balloons and play with the vortex system accompanied by sound workshops with Octopus. More pictures by Dave here.

  6. Last month I was using @amcewen ‘s marvellous new and improved #bubblino code and an arduino ethernet triggered relay switch to help #technoviking inflate and deflate in response to #technoviking twitter searches for Wafaa Bilal’s Meme Junkyard project at AND Festival. Was a brilliant bit of fabrication thanks to the awesome SpaceCadets team and producer Tomas Harold from Cornerhouse. Also a quick big up to the AND volunteers who looked after him over the opening weekend!

    Last month I was using @amcewen ‘s marvellous new and improved #bubblino code and an arduino ethernet triggered relay switch to help #technoviking inflate and deflate in response to #technoviking twitter searches for Wafaa Bilal’s Meme Junkyard project at AND Festival. Was a brilliant bit of fabrication thanks to the awesome SpaceCadets team and producer Tomas Harold from Cornerhouse. Also a quick big up to the AND volunteers who looked after him over the opening weekend!

  7. Last month I worked with the ever excellent Octopus Collective and young people in Year 6 at Black Combe Primary school in Millom, Cumbria to develop some interactive text adventures using Inform. Starting off we made them play The Hobbit on a zx spectrum emulator and some adventure game classics like Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy and Zork. For people used to playing contemporary games, to go back to games based purely on grammatical logic and imagination and no pictures was quite a leap. You can play the games in-browser from these links and you can play Abandon Hope one of my favourites here. They came up with a fantastic series of games though, bending the reality of their school into all kinds of directions. Apparently they are already working on their sequels! Thanks to all the supportive staff at the school and the endless enthusiasm of Peter Clark who built the best whiteboard hack Ive ever seen: its on the floor, kids can walk on it and its about 6m x 3m wide. Millom has a lovely resource in that school. (via octopus collective - Black Combe Adventures)

    Last month I worked with the ever excellent Octopus Collective and young people in Year 6 at Black Combe Primary school in Millom, Cumbria to develop some interactive text adventures using Inform.

    Starting off we made them play The Hobbit on a zx spectrum emulator and some adventure game classics like Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy and Zork. For people used to playing contemporary games, to go back to games based purely on grammatical logic and imagination and no pictures was quite a leap.

    You can play the games in-browser from these links and you can play Abandon Hope one of my favourites here.

    They came up with a fantastic series of games though, bending the reality of their school into all kinds of directions. Apparently they are already working on their sequels!

    Thanks to all the supportive staff at the school and the endless enthusiasm of Peter Clark who built the best whiteboard hack Ive ever seen: its on the floor, kids can walk on it and its about 6m x 3m wide. Millom has a lovely resource in that school.

    (via octopus collective - Black Combe Adventures)

  8. Crazy Golf Hack commissioned by FON 2011. Found this nice film of the project last year while planning Crazy Golf Hack 2 this summer (film by Ellie Chaney & Octopus Collective)

  9. (via EarthUnBound on Vimeo)

    Uses Chiz Turnross’s manhole cover rubbing as a graphic score to trigger sound from the legendary psycho-geographic game Earthbound for the Super Nintendo System. Made with Iannix on osx iannix.org/ and via Glenn Boulter’s JHack mod of a SNES Earthbound ROM played in ZSNES on osx

    Based on a collaboration with Artist Glenn Boulter, using material from Ross & Glenn’s Operetta ‘Mr Saturn’ in tuen based on his EarthBound mod ‘Mr Saturn’ commissioned by Ross Dalziel & Petr Svarovsky for Ultima Contemporary Music Festival 2011.

    Find out more 
    chizturnross.tumblr.com/equinox%20day%201

  10. The BBC followed up a project I did for @ANDFestival; I setup a series of DropDays to try to seed Aram Bartholls excellent #DeadDrops project and make it go viral in the Northwest. @hwayoung and I were interviewed outside @MadLabUK to do a quick Mad Drop Repair… Who knows it might pickup again with some elusive regional TV airtime! Long live the DeadDrop!

    Here I am plugging the concept at Ignite Liverpool last year…

    Ross Dalziel - “Unclouding your data” (by IgniteLiverpool)